False recollections and the congruence of suggested information

Abstract

In two experiments, congruence of postevent information was manipulated in order to explore its role in the misinformation effect. Congruence of a detail was empirically defined as its compatibility (or match) with a concrete event. Based on this idea it was predicted that a congruent suggested detail would be more easily accepted than an incongruent one. In Experiments 1 and 2 two factors(congruence and truth value ) were manipulated within-subjects, and a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test was used followed by phenomenological judgements. Furthermore, in the second experiment participants were asked to describe four critical items (two seen and two suggested details)to explore differences and similarities between real and unreal memories. Both experiments clearly showed that the congruence of false information caused a robust misinformation effect, so that congruent information was much more accepted than false incongruent information. Furthermore, congruence increased the descriptive and phenomenological similarities between perceived and suggested memories, thus contributing to the misleading effect.

The misinformation effect revisited: Interactions between spontaneous memory processes and misleading suggestions

“…As can be seen in Appendices B and C, both types of suggested items were plausible and congruent with the target scenes of the event (see Perez-Mata & Diges, 2007). The Same-BL and Different-BL items were chosen such that their lexical (Experiment 1) and visual (Experiments 2 and 3) similarity to the event items would be comparable.…”

False memories in forensic psychology: do cognition and brain activity tell the same story?

“…Participants in the misleading condition select the misleading item significantly more frequently than the original item in comparison to the participants in the control or consistent condition. Further developments of the procedure have included additional measures such as confidence estimations and reaction time (Loftus, 1996), source attribution (Lindsay and Johnson, 1989;Johnson et al, 1993), Tulving's (1985) phenomenological judgments of remember/ know (Pérez-Mata and Diges, 2007), and qualitative measures from descriptions (Schooler et al, 1986;Pérez-Mata and Diges, 2007). However, none of these additional measures have been able to successfully discriminate between true and suggested items, indicating that once participants accept the misleading details, they are unable to access the perceived details observed in the original event (Pérez-Mata et al, 2002;Loftus, 2003Loftus, , 2005.…”

The false memory syndrome: Experimental studies and comparison to confabulations

“…We have interpreted and summarized them into seven categories. DRM responses are associated with increased: (1) Need for complete and integrated memories as reflected in an exaggerated tendency for completion or “filling-in” of incomplete memories and in the inclusion of increased and more coherent context [19–22]. (2) Imagination and fantasy-proneness, wish fulfillment, magical thinking, self-reported anomalies of experience, and vivid imagery schema [8,23– 26].…”